True Fall

Frost on the grass when I took the dog to the dog park this morning, and so cold I looked for (but did not find) my gloves. A freeze warning out for tonight.

Brr, fall! My favorite season.

Ow, Ow, Ow

My teeth have been removed. I am in considerable pain, but unable to use pain medication at the moment because I have to drive.

Ow, ow, ow.

Donate to Your Local Foodbanks

Give them money if you can -- they can do more with it than you can. But they'll take food as well.

I set up a monthly donation sometime ago, which I have just increased this month. It won't make up for what the Trump administration is doing, starving kids for political reasons, but it will help some.

If you're in Arkansas:

Northwest Arkansas Food Bank

River Valley Food bank

Arkansas Food Bank

Usually there's a church somewhere also running a food bank. You know how I feel about religion, but if that's your pathway, take it.

Life in the Previous Century

A post over on Reddit about kids today has me remembering when I was four years old, how my older brother and I would walk to the Stop'n'Shop, which was at least two miles round trip, to buy penny candy. This was when you could get candy for a penny a piece. My mother usually gave us each a nickel, probably to get us out of the house for an hour or two.

Now'n'Laters were my favorite. You could also get wax coke bottles, and chalky candy cigarettes. There were also candy bars, but those cost an entire nickel, so we never got those. Bazooka gum came with little cartoons inside the wrapper. Root beer barrels were also great. 

The ice cream truck came by every day in the summer. Popsicles were a dime each, or you could get those chocolate coated ice cream bars. There were more expensive options, but my mother only gave us a dime each.

No wonder I have two abscessed teeth.

Anyway, the most astonishing part of this memory, to me, is that my mother let us walk all that way alone when we were four and five years old. Then again, when we weren't walking to the store, we were often out in the wilderness behind the house (the woods) for hours at a time, playing with matches and dodging snakes.

Also we were always barefoot. Well, I think we wore shoes in the winter. But other than that.

Brush Your Teeth, Folks

They're going to have to pull both my abscessed teeth. Then I'm getting implants. Or I should say, eventually I get implants. (It's a whole process -- they put cadaver bone in your jaw, and let it grow to your own bone; then once that heals, they put in a screw thingie. Then once that heals, they send you to the dentist, who gives you a cap. Two caps, in my case.)

Meanwhile, neither dentist will give me pain medication, because Arkansas hates people in pain. The oral surgeon says they can give me some after the "procedure." The dentist says take Tylenol.

I do have antibiotics, which are helping a little, by knocking back the infection. That's what's causing all the pain, apparently.

I remember reading books written in the 1930s, people talking about tooth aches in their childhood like they were a chronic condition. Before antibiotics, anesthetics, and modern dentistry, I suppose they were.

What I'm Reading Now

 A lot of SF for review purposes, and also these books:

Ursula Le Guin, Birthday of the World

This is a collection of stories and novellas, and a re-read for me. I love Le Guin, of course, but mostly I re-read this for the novella "Paradises Lost," which is set on a generation ship. I'm reading a novel for revieew by A.D. Sui which also involves a generation ship, which made me want to read this one again. Written in 2002. the novella is influenced by the increasing political power of the Religious Right, which was just beginning to grow at that point. In the small community on the generation ship (4000 people), a new religion is born and soon becomes prevalent enough to attempt a takeover of the governing committees on the ship -- the education committee first, and then others. This is an excellent novella which is even more relevant today than it was in 2002. A quotation:

"One kind [of person," Luis] said, "has a need, a lack, they have to have a certain vitamin...Vitamin Belief."

[Hsing] considered.

"Not genetic," he said. "Cultural. Metaorganic. But as individually real and definite as a metabolic deficiency. People either need to believe or they don't."

She still pondered.

"The ones that do don't believe that the others don't. They don't believe there are people who don't believe."

"Hope?" she offered tentatively.

"Hope isn't belief. Hope's contingent upon reality, even when it's not very realistic. Belief dismisses reality."

(snip)

"What's the harm in believing?"

"It's dangerous to confuse reality with unreality," he said promptly. "To confuse desire with power, ego with cosmos. Extremely dangerous."

Helen Philips, Hum

This is sort of like science fiction, in that it is set in the near future. I'm not reviewing it for either of my columns, though. It's the story of a woman who has lost her job. Her husband works gig jobs, doing things like emptying litter boxes for the very wealthy. The woman volunteers for experimental surgery to (slightly) change her face, so that surveillance cameras can't identify her. She does this because it pays a lot of money, but then she uses the money to take her husband and two kids on a visit to a botanical garden, which is extremely expensive because all the actual forests and flowers and insects and so on have been killed off by climate change. 

There's a lot here about kids using screens non-stop and AI doing the parenting and gig work and the flaws of capitalism and precarity and blah blah blah. Nothing new, to be honest, and nothing new to say about any of it.

This is an extremely depressing book. Maybe don't read this unless you like novels where the characters are powerless and their lives are catastrophes.

Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. 

This is a re-read. If you haven't ever read this book, I highly recommend it. It's about Francie Nolan, a poor kid in Brooklyn from her birth to when she leaves the city in the first two decades of the 20th Century. Based on Smith's own life and memories of Brooklyn, it was originally published in 1943. I've been reading and re-reading this book since I was about ten years old, and I re-read it after watching the 1943 movies on YouTube (it's free, though you do get a few ads).

The movie is pretty good, but the book is better. Much more realistic than you might expect from a book written in the 40s, and centered almost entirely around the women characters -- Francie's brother and father are main characters, but it's mostly a story about her mother and sisters and grandmother, as well as Francie herself.

Fumi Yoshinaga, What Did You Eat Yesterday?

This is a manga which is mostly about cooking in Japan, though there's a little peripheral drama among the people doing the eating and cooking. Also quite a bit about shopping in Japan. The main characters are the lawyer, who does most of the cooking, and his boyfriend who is a hair stylist. The series started in 2007, and there's a bit of angst from Shiko, the lawyer, because he's not out while his boyfriend, Kenji, is. Shiko is a tightwad, and Kenji a spendthrift, so there's some squabbling about that. 

Apparently the manga was made into a TV show, but I haven't seen that. I haven't read all the volumes either-- there's a billion of them -- but if you like cooking and representations of quotidian life, you might like this one.

Fumi Yoshinaga is also the creator of Ooku, which won the Tiptree Award/Otherwise Award in 2009.

UGH TIMES TWO

One of my teeth had been hurting, so I went to the dentist today. Not one but two abscessed teeth.

Consultation with the oral surgeon guy at dawn tomorrow.

GOD.

How the GOP Governs

In Arkansas, as in much of the United States, grocery, fuel, and rent prices are climbing. I paid ten dollars for a dozen eggs last week, and flour prices have doubled over the past few years. Even things I used to live on because they were cheap -- rice, chicken, potatoes -- are now expensive. A whole chicken is $4.99/pound, when you can find one. You can't always even get a whole chicken. And white meat and thighs are even more expensive. 

In Arkansas, our education system is failing. We're 44th in the Nation. 

Housing prices have skyrocketed over the past ten years.

Farms are failing.

Health insurance prices are climbing.

What is our GOP government, led by Sarah Huckabee Sanders, doing in response? Why, they're mandating that every school, including universities, including our flagship university, put copies of the Protestant version of the Ten Commandments in every classroom. This is, obviously, blatantly unconstitutional, which bothers absolutely no member of the GOP, which daily wipes their asses on the Constitution.

They're making it illegal for trans people to pee in the bathroom that matches their gender.

They're keeping all three trans women in the state from playing sports.

They're forbidding Fayetteville from becoming a "sanctuary city." (Fayetteville was not a sanctuary city. We're just relatively liberal compared to the rest of the state, which is, of course, a crime.)

They are, in other words, appealing to their bigoted base by harming the least powerful people in the state. That's how the GOP operates. It doesn't solve any of the problems, it doesn't help the people. It just gives them someone to hate, and makes their bigotry feel virtuous.

That's our country. That's what conservatives want.

Why does it matter if Sanders forces universities to put religious displays in university classrooms? Let me tell you a little story. This is from when I was teaching History of the English language. One day early in the semester I was explaining the Great Vowel Shift, and how it worked. To do that I had to back up to the Proto-Indo-European language, and how sounds diverged as dialects grew into separate languages over the vast arc of time.

After class, one of my students came up to me and asked why I hadn't talked about the Tower of Babel and how that had caused the one language that everyone spoke to become many languages. She was a sweet student, who had been educated in an Evangelical church school, so I had to gently explain to her the difference between religion and science. "In universities," I remember saying, "we use evidence-based data to understand how things happen, how they came to be. Religions rely on revelation and faith, and that's not how we work in the academy."

Imagine me trying to say that with religious texts plastered on the wall. Imagine trying to do science, or explain about deep time, or get students to understand evolution, when Sarah Huckabee Sanders has told them their religion, their version of that religion, is the ultimate authority, in the universities as well as in their churches.

FAux News

Having listened to Fox News in more than one waiting room over the past month, this is indeed exactly what it is like:

Transcript: Three people in an airport with luggage watching a giant TV screen. The newscaster is saying, "It's also the Democrat's fault that your flight is delayed by three hours and you'll be seated behind a screaming baby."

UGH

Now *I* have a toothache.

And the dentist can't see me until Tuesday.

Luckily so far Tylenol is handling it. Though apparently that will make me (more) autistic.

Octavia Butler: Library of America No. 393

I received the new Library of America volume of Butler's work (no. 393, as they list it -- volume 393, I want to say) yesterday. 

If you're not familiar with the Library of America series, it's a series published by a non-profit with the purpose of keeping works of classical American literature in print. 

This is the second volume of Butler's work they have published. The first contained Fledgling, Kindred, and some short stories, including "Bloodchild," which is probably her most well-known short story. 

Parable of the Sower, in which Butler apparently saw Trump coming (actually, she just took Reagan and the world of the 1980s and extrapolated), is probably her best-known novel at this point. Not her best novel. That's almost certainly Fledgling, though I would be willing to listen to arguments for the Lilith's Brood trilogy, which is what this new volume contains.

I didn't really need to buy this volume, since I already have Lilith's Brood in paperback. But the Library of America volumes are lovely books, and also I wanted to read the extra material -- the notes, some letters from Butler, and the introduction, by Imani Perry. Yes, I'm a nerd. But if I hadn't done it, I wouldn't have come across this note:

Writers have no idea about the quality of their work. None. 

Ugh My Knee Hurts

Which brings up the perennial question: Should I go see my primary care physician, or am I just at the point in life where everything is going to hurt all the time?

I'm choosing the latter, not because I actually think it's true, but because I can't bear spending one more hour in a doctor's waiting room.

Feeling Gloomy

Mainly it's because of Dr Skull's health problems -- on top of everything else, he now has an infected tooth which has to be pulled as soon as possible -- but also because of the state of the country, which honestly, can we please not?

While I was sitting in the waiting room at the oral surgeon waiting for Dr Skull, Fox News was playing on the television. It's just ludicrously non-stop propaganda. Can people actually take that silliness seriously? They spent twenty minutes saying, over and over, that the Democrats had shut down the government because of their hatred for Trump. 

No explaining. No further details. Just that, over and over.

Then they moved on to "left wing violence," which has apparently increased over the past decade. Again, they just said that over and over, for about ten minutes.

As we were leaving, they had moved on to Trump, who is the best president ever. Everyone agrees!

This is my country? This is my country.

Another Five Hours in the ER

Dr Skull had uncontrollable shivering and a fever so I took him to the ER, where we sat for five hours and then left AMA.

Good thing we don't live in Canada, huh? Imagine what a nightmare it would be to have socialized medicine.

Also

We went to Whole Foods last night as a treat and SO MANY people were there. I cannot deal with crowds and noise and being trapped in a crowd with no clear escape route, so by the time we had been there like ten minutes I was jittering on the edge.

We did see the kid's main professors and their two adorable children, so that was a nice bit. The older one was running around with monarch butterfly wings, very cute. The younger one is still an infant, but also very cute.

And we got some excellent sourdough bread and the last of the season's figs. Worth it? Maybe.

What MAGA does to Education

On the one hand, this is sort of funny, in a depressing way: the MAGAts took over New College in Florida because it was "too woke," and have been spending tons of money turning it into a failure. (H/t Nicole and Maggie.)

For example, the new trustees decided one of the problems was that too many women were attending the college. (Because women = woke.) So they recruited unqualified men to enroll in the college, with exactly the result anyone might have predicted. 

Retention has fallen off a cliff, as qualified students leave to get a better education elsewhere and the unqualified students flunk out, or just quit attending.

DeSantis wanted this all to work so badly that New College got a blank check from the legislature, and Josh Moody at Inside Higher Ed reports that the school has been using that check and loading it with zeros. Annual cost per student at other Florida state system schools = $10,000. At New College it's more like $134,000. No, that is not one my typos.

(Snip)

Nathan Allen, who was VP of strategy at New College for 18 months after the takeover told Moody that he thinks legislators may be running out of patience:

“I think that the Senate and the House are increasingly sensitive to the costs and the outcomes,” Allen said. “Academically, Richard’s running a Motel 6 on a Ritz-Carlton budget, and it makes no sense."

The real punchline, of course, is that this is what Trump supporters want to do -- and are doing -- to universities all over the nation. They are destroying what had been a flawed but world-class educational system in order to piss off liberals. Oh, they claim it's because they don't want students "indoctrinated," but what they mean is, they want to indoctrinate students. (Actually educating students is far too likely to lead to those students becoming progressive.)

Meanwhile, MAGA is still doing its best to make the deification of Charlie Kirk (Charlie Kirk! FFS!) a litmus test, firing those who won't whimper about what a great guy Kirk was, or recite the correct catechism about his wonders and miracles. This raving over-reaction, which reminds me of the Satanic panics of the 1980s, may have gotten at least one young black man killed.

Meanwhile, the GOP has shut down the government because the Democrats in government won't cave in and allow Medicaid to be funded by the very poorest of Americans. If you can't afford healthcare, you should just die -- this has been the GOP "healthcare plan" all along.

And, meanwhile, they are also driving the economy off a cliff. Why? Apparently because someone who knew nothing about economics told Trump how he could make American manufacturing great again, and now everyone around Trump is too terrified to explain to him what a stupid idea tariffs are.

Meanwhile, Trump want to use the US military to invade "woke" cities and destroy "the enemy within." What enemy would that be? Not just liberal or progressives or immigrants or trans people, though yes, all of that group. No, the "enemy within" is anyone who won't lick Trump's boots, or won't lick them enough.

Meanwhile, Trump already using his federal forces to attack cities he sees as enemy cities, most lately Chicago. Portland is apparently next on his list. In Chicago, doors were broken down and men, women, and children ripped from their beds, zip-tied -- some of the naked -- and hauled away to undisclosed holding areas, where they are going unfed, unwashed, and uncared for. People were pepper-sprayed. People were beaten. Some of these people were immigrants, and some were US citizens. Your status doesn't matter. If Trump sees you as an enemy, you're an enemy. (Bear in mind that he sees all immigrants, all brown people, all LGBTQ people, as enemies, or potential enemies,)

Meanwhile, the GOP is doing everything they can to stave off their defeat in the midterms, including redrawing voting districts to disempower non-white people. 

Does any of this matter? Not to conservative Americans. So long as trans people are suffering, that's all they need to make them happy.

It's been a long time since I was naively proud of my country, but more and more lately, the nation just makes me sick.

The Return of Dr Skull

He's been released from the gulag, I mean hospital.

He's not well, but he's better.

Dr Skull in the Hospital

Dr Skull is in the hospital again, this time because his potassium levels are very low. That's probably related to his kidney disease.

That's what that last post was all about. Argh. Can't the course of ordinary life run smoothly, just for a little while?